1. Cluster Computing

2. References HA Linux Project –http://www.linux-ha.org Sys Admin –http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1155/sam0101a/0101a.htm Load Balancing in Server 2003 –http://channels.lockergnome.com/it/archives/20041022_load_balancing_in_windows_server_ 2003.phtml Microsoft TechNet –http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/98d46a24-96d8-412c-87d8- 28ace62323d21033.mspx Force10 Networks –http://www.force10networks.com/applications/mediarendering.asp ARS Technica –http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/klat2.ars IBM –http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/news/pressreleases/2002/nov/p655.html Tsunami Technologies –http://www.tsunamictechnologies.com University of Buffalo –http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/hotpages/content/u2/u2.htm

3. Who Cares ? Science Field (SETI) Medical Field (Protein Folding/ VR) Hollywood (SFX) Webmasters Anyone who needs massive amounts of computing power – on a “budget”

4. Outline Types of computer clusters Who uses them? Benefits of each Costs

5. 3 Types of Clusters High Availability (HA) Load Balancing / (LB) High Performance/Parallel (HP)

6. High Availability Clusters Two or more servers setup so that if one fails, the other takes over –Share a common data source –Only one accesses data at any time –Monitor each-other by sending “heartbeat” packets between themselves –When one server fails, the work is migrated over to the working one –Users experience a brief break in transmission (typically a few seconds) but not a total loss

7. HA Clusters ( cont )

8. Load Balancing Cluster A main server distributes data/application requests to any one of many other servers/nodes –A web server could distribute http requests to appropriate servers based on proximity to client, etc –Often called a “server farm” –Improve performance by splitting up requests

9. Load Balancing ( cont )

10. High Performance Cluster Divides computational tasks amongst many different nodes, allowing their shared processing power to be utilized –296 of the world’s fastest computers are HP clusters (CNET News) –Nodes can communicate with each-other while processing –Processor intensive calculations that would take years on a typical computer, can be completed in a small fraction of the time

11. HP Clusters ( cont )

12. Costs The price per gigaflop when using a supercomputer is about 5x more expensive than with a cluster Clusters have brought the price per GFlop down to around $85 Supercomputer prices have come down as well though a high-end Sun Fire 15K server with 16 1.0Ghz processors and 64 gigabytes of ram costs $320,000

13. Costs ( cont ) Cost of ownership –Important to remember you are not just buying the hardware inside the computer case –Switches, cabling, and interface hardware must be purchased as well –Power consumption of a large cluster (for example 20 nodes) will carry a price tag in excess of $3000 per year –Cost to free up space for a large cluster –Cost to pay employees to set it up and monitor it

14. Case Study University of Buffalo, New York 800 Dell nodes each housing dual 3.2 GHz Xeon Processors

15. Case Study The University of Buffalo cluster cost $2.3 million to implement –Runs at a peak of around 10 TeraFlops (10 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second) –Put them around #40 on the Top500 most powerful computer list –Costs $150,000+ per year in electric costs –For now can only be run at 60% power without causing a power outage –Rendered a video that would have taken a typical home PC 125 days to render, in 8 hours

16. Cost Effective Alternative Many companies offer “cluster on demand” service –Rent time on clusters from 3 rd party companies –Great for companies that do not need that much computing power, all the time –Typically pay per CPU hour: 60 cents per CPU hour 40 node cluster 72 hours $1700 (most companies have minimum hour requirements)

17. HP Cluster Construction MPI (Message Passing Interface) –Most widely used standard –Sought to unify parallel programming –Gives programmers a starting point –Works best when programmed with Fortran, but C++ works as well

18. Cluster Construction ( cont ) Install Fortran ( or C ) Compiler Configure SSH (need to be able to execute commands at root without asking for a password) Setup a network file system Install MPI (from anl.gov) Edit MPI file to add each node’s hostname Run test programs! (most steps were taken from http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cluster2/index.html)

19. Future Create a HP Cluster in the computer lab CCSU audio/video server into a high availability setup

20. Questions?